I'm Building a New App Using Ionic Framework

I have been working the past few weeks (off and on) on a new app using Ionic Framework which is a mobile development framework built using AngularJS on top of Cordova to access native API’s for the different platforms. Its pretty great, they explain it better than me:

Ionic is a powerful HTML5 native app development framework that helps you build native-feeling mobile apps all with web technologies like HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

To start out with the plan for the app is to replace an old app I have been using on my phone for while to keep track of money and bank accounts. The other app is designed in the old iOS 5/6 (ish) style and its not optimized for the newer sizes (by that I mean 5 and 5s not to mention 6 and 6 plus). I am tentatively going with the name “ChkBook” for the app because I basically use it for check book type stuff. So yeah, that took allot of imagination.

The decision to use Ionic started out just to try out a new framework, but wow am I pleased with my decision and with Ionic Framework. In the past I have used Xamarin to develop an app for iOS (CalcuNotes). I really enjoyed the process and very much support what Xamarin is doing (as of now I have a license for a few more months that they gave me for a blog post I wrote). I found Ionic Framework after doing some development here and there with AngularJS and I was on PluralSight looking at some videos and I found one on “Building Mobile Apps With the Ionic Framework and AngularJS” and just started watching it and kinda fell in love. Its a really good course and I recommend it.

So I have almost gotten to a minimum viable product with the app and in the next few days after I get some of the bugs sorted out I plan on starting the process of submitting it to the iOS app store. I plan to submit it to the google play store as well in the future but I am focusing on iOS for now, don’t know why but its probably just cause I use an iPhone. You can find all the code that I am writing for the app in its GitHub repo (https://github.com/pdsullivan/ChkBook). I guess I should also mention that I will keep the app open source, I figured why not :).

I will most defiantly be writing more about the process of developing this app and using Ionic Framework because there is so much interesting stuff going on in the AngularJS community along with Ionic. I have lots of really cool ideas for functionality to maybe add in the future with this app so I am looking forward to that, should be fun! Thanks for reading.